I stare at the sinusoidal curves disarranging themselves over and over in the sudden excitement of compression. In the vague distance, figures bob in and out of view: sleek wetsuits, skin turned to lustrous seal-hide, spring-loaded shortboards held down with latent buoyancy, waiting for the coming set.

I study the surfers as they wait. My memories roll like cobbles on a steep shore, turning to the South Coast of Big Sur, and the lost sage who drank the sea:

“You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.”

The longer I stare at the waves, the less my own identity seems self-evident, and the more I feel myself disappearing into a complex geometry of energy threads, echoing from unknown fountains across vast fetches of empty space, now caught in an elaborate dance of molecule and motion – a temporary waveform registered on the face of a mirror plane, the unbroken vitreous lustre of the water’s surface.

The waves oscillate the water molecules up and down in a circular orbit, but the molecules do not move forward with the wave. The swell passes over and through them, and they remain, spring-loaded, awaiting the next. Every thousandth moment, the angle of the water’s surface reels to catch the fading winter sunlight, sending a spark arcing toward me through the heavy breath of the air. Transmuted starlight: the momentary spark is a stylus inscribing the blank clay tablet of my mind.

My feet hold fast on the crumbling precipice of dead shells and thousand-aged mud frozen solid. In the cove below me the feather-boa kelp dances sinuously beneath the fluorite surface – auburn strands of fringe galloping like an endless film reel of wild horses. The seaweed shelters the floor of the cove. Rainbow rivers of gravel slip downward in billowing cloaks of shadow and bursts of flourescent-grey sky. Beneath the canopy is a verdant grotto; it offers respite to the darting sleepless fish and the creeping shelled crustaceans on their endless pilgrimages across the inundated sand-sea. Somewhere among the waterlogged wrack, the eye of an octopus watches – a spark of intelligence like the glare of a lantern under the velvet cloak of night.